No One Rides For Free - Larry Beinhart (28 page)

I shoved some people. Subtly and not too hard. But
still I managed to provoke some antisocial behavior. One umbrella
warrior got me in the ear. I reached out and knocked the thing away.
When it tilted, the wind grabbed it and pulled it from his hand. It
shot happily down the street, then died a messy but mercifully quick
death under the wheels of a
Daily News
truck.

The umbrella man turned on me. He was bigger than me
and probably younger. He cursed. I just stared back, letting him know
that I felt meaner than he did, that I was perfectly
willing
to let him come at me.

"Asshole, " he said.

That sounded right, so I said, "Yeah." He
hurried off, down into the subway.

Joey was waiting when I got back to the office. He
suggested we go out for a drink together. 

"Why?" I asked.

" 'Cause you're being some kind of asshole,"
he explained. There was a consensus forming.

I dried myself with brown paper towels, the worst
kind, and got into some drier clothes. We walked silent and solemn up
the West Side. The hookers huddled in doorways, dashing out
occasionally to ask if someone wanted a date. I thought of Christina.

Come back when the policeman is in another street.
And Beatrice will let you see her thin soul under
the paint.

We went to Kevin Murphy 's place on Ninth, off
Fifty-third Street. Kevin is long dead. They say his wake was
something to remember. The new owner is a Puerto Rican named Angel.
When he first took over, he tried to spruce the place up and attract
the pimp trade. But the cops kept hanging out and people who have
money don't want to associate with policemen. Eventually the photos
of ballplayers from mythical teams like the Brooklyn Dodgers and the
New York Giants, the signed photo of Cardinal Cooke, and signs that
said things like "The Lord created whiskey to keep the Irish
from ruling the world" went back up on the walls. Kevin Murphy's
was born a cops' bar, and as a cops' bar it lives. We  walked in
among them.

They were all right, the lot of them, it wasn't up
to them
And they knew it; if somebody
had come along and said,
I've got a
spot for a two-legged animal in the world I'm working
    
on.
'They
wouldn't have made anything like they had been made.

We sat in a booth and the waitress came over. Joey
ordered scotch. I said make it two, and make it Johnny Black.

"What's bugging you?"

"It's just the waiting."

"It's the broad. You've let yourself go bats
over a broad."

"When that guy came after me in D.C., I busted
up his kneecap so he'll never walk right again. It bothers me how
good I feel about that."

"
Johnny Walker Black," the waitress
announced.

"That's self-defense," Joey said.

"I know what you mean," the waitress said.
"If I drink that bar scotch I wake up with a mean hangover. I
mean
mean
."

"
If it turns out that it was Charles Goreman
that hit Wood, I'm not gonna like it. I like the man."

"Wallowing in ambiguity is like wallowing in
self-pity," Joey said. "It's dumb, and you like doing it.
You have a good mind, you 're a smart guy. You're supposed to use
that to help yourself, not punish yourself."

"There's a real problem with this case. You know
what it is? There isn't gonna be any smoking gun. Down in D.C. the
trail will just dry up when it gets to Wellby. If Wellby has to have
the second man, whoever he is, hit, he will. Then there's the gap
between Wellby and the guy who asked for the hit. There's only one
person who can close that gap: Wellby. And there's only one
circumstance in which he would close that gap: to buy himself out of
the chair. So if I find out whodunnit, whaddam I gonna do about it?"

"Maybe that's not your job."

"What? . . . Oh yeah, that's true," I said,
"but who is going to do something about it? I'm going to sit
there and know, and watch nothing happen about it?"

"That comes with the territory," Joey said.

"Well, well, if it ain't the world's prize fuck,
Tony Cassella," another voice said.

I looked up. Jack Whelan was standing over me, drunk
and sneering. I shrugged and looked away.

"Wazzamatta, cocksucker, don' wanna talk to me?
. . .Well, I don' care, I wanna talk to you, fuckface."

"Go home," Joey said to him.

"Fuck off, old man," Whelan told him. "This
is the little cocksucker who stuck a knife in my back. I just want to
tell him that I'm looking forward to pissing on his grave."

"Get the fuck out of here, Whelan. You ain't
gonna do anything to me and you know it. Stop the noise and get out
of here," I told him and went back to my scotch.

The Corrections Department does not attract the
highest caliber of recruits, mostly Jack Whelans. I knew how to read,
write and pass tests. By their standards, a shining star. So they
made me an investigator.

The Corrections Department takes the Whelans and
gives them inadequate training, inadequate supervision and inadequate
motivation. The corruption comes easy. I became aware of it very
quickly and wrote memos. Nothing was done.

Then one day an inmate, flying on coke and infirmary
morphine, went on a rampage and killed three other inmates before he
was stopped. One was a nineteen-year-old, serving a year and a day
for a barroom brawl, who was due to get out in two days. The family
made noise. It came out in the investigation that the killer had
gotten the drugs from a guard. That made the
New
York Times
. The commissioner decided to mount
an internal investigation before the outside world handed him his own
Knapp Commission. My memos were remembered. I went in undercover.
Whelan was one of the people I put away.

When it started I was clean and righteous. It seemed
simple. But I was putting people away who had been my friends, some
of them. And I was learning about them. For Whelan, who I never
liked, the extra money he made doing favors for inmates was the
difference between public school and parochial school for his
daughters. When he was indicted, his wife filed for divorce and he
lost the kids as well.

I saw how easy it was for me to keep my nose clean. I
didn't have the financial responsibilities of a family. I had only
applied for the Corrections job because there was a hiring freeze in
the Police Department. When the P.D. started hiring again, my name
figured to be high on the list. I was not stuck as a prison guard for
life. My righteousness began to feel like a cheat.

I thought that the drinking helped. Fighting seemed
to help too, when I was doing it. In the morning I began to realize
that it was called assault and disturbing the peace. Some of the
people I went drinking with, and some of the women I was sleeping
with, liked a little cocaine. So did I once I tasted it. Simple
possession was a felony.

Sometimes, when I was hurting and hungover, I'd use
some coke to get me through the day. When a day costs an extra fifty
or hundred dollars, a salary doesn't stretch the way it used to. One
way to deal with that is to deal enough to cover costs.

Gradually I built a string of felonies as good as
Jack Whelan's. The only difference left was that he had one arrest
and one conviction. That wasn't different enough for me to live with
putting him in a cage. If we had been that different to start with. I
lost perspective on that question.

The center couldn't hold, and the pieces of me began
to scatter farther and farther apart. I didn't have any trouble
understanding why Whelan hated Cassella. At the time, it was
something we could agree on.

"Maybe I will do something about it,"
Whelan said.

"You won't," Joey replied, "if for no
other reason than you'd be scared to have an old man like me after
you."

Whelan looked at Joey, then spit in Joey's drink.

I backhanded him across the table. Glad of the excuse
to do it. It was a good shot. It sent him stumbling a half-step back.
He slipped and sat down on his ass on the floor. It gave me time to
get out of the booth. He was on his feet by the time I was out, but
still off  balance.

If he had backed off, I would have let it go. He came
at me in a clumsy rush. I watched his move with pleasure, stepped in
and hit him in the gut. My right hand sank deep in the soft belly. He
began to fold, but I put two more in the same spot.

By then the room had responded. Five cops were around
to break us up. I just stepped aside and let Whelan sink slowly to
the floor, vomiting on himself.

Joey came out from the booth. He knew a couple of the
cops and told them it was all right and it was all over. They backed
off, and Joey said, "Let's get out of here."

"Sure," I said, shaking with anger and the
adrenaline rush. "I shouldn't have done that."

"He requested it," Joey shrugged.

Somebody was helping Whelan up. He shook them off and
started toward me.

"Don't," I said, raising my fists.

"I don't have to, fuckface," he said
backing up, "there's a big fat fucking contract on you,
fuckface. And somebody is gonna collect. When they do, I'm gonna
shake their hand and go and piss on your fucking grave."
 

28
FAMILY

ANGEL CAME OUT
of nowhere
and stepped between us with his baseball bat.

I wanted to go for him, but Joey was pulling me back,
Whelan's friends were pulling him back and half the cops from Midtown
North were on their feet ready to play peace officer.

"I gotta find out what he's talking about."

"We'll find out," Joey told me. "Go
take care of Glenda. Make sure she and the kid stay in the house."

He was right about what was important. The phone in
the bar was busted again. I went outside. The phone on the corner was
occupied, a hooker phoning home. She was smaller than me but looked
meaner, so I moved up the block to find another phone. It was on the
far side of the avenue. I ran through the rain, dodging cars, cabs,
trucks and one mad bike messenger. I still found it unbelievably
aggravating that they had gone up 150 percent to a quarter, but it
was an emergency, and I paid.

The first thing I wanted to know was whether Wayne
was home. I was relieved to hear that he was.

"What's going on, Anthony?"

"I'll explain when I get home. Don't open the
door for anyone but me. In fact, come to think of it, don't open the
door for anyone. I have my keys."

"I'm glad you didn't lose your keys. That's very
reassuring. Are you all right?"

"Yeah. Yeah. Sit tight. I'll be there soon."

I tried to find a cab, surrendered and went
underground, but the subway wasn't in a hurry either. It took forever
to get home, and almost the minute I walked in the door the intercom
rang. I jumped. It was Joey.

He was bursting to say whatever he had to say but
didn't want speak in front of Glenda, so he just stood there and
twitched like a man trying to shut the valve on his bladder after
it's started to leak.

"We will not," I explained to him, "somehow
succeed in sending Glenda out of the room so we can discuss this in
private."

"That is correct," she said.

"Yeah, well, all right then. What we did was, we
took Whelan out back. Nobody's interested in filing charges or makin'
a case or nothing like mat, so we did not discuss Miranda or anything
of that other legal procedure. This is me, Chic—that's Tommy
Cicoollini—and his partner, you saw them in the bar.

"Whelan's story is that he got into a
conversation at a Blarney Stone down in the thirties, his regular
hangout, with a guy named Bruno. Whelan doesn't know if that's his
real name, never having met him before. But this so-called Bruno knew
Whelan and asked him about you. Your habits, hangouts and such.
Whelan wanted to know why. Bruno, who apparently knew that Whelan was
somewhat hostile about you, says something to the effect of 'someone
is looking for Cassella, cause they wanna bid him a fond farewell.'
Whelan was, as we know, happy to hear that, so he pressed Bruno for
confirmation 'in a discreet manner,' that the phraseology had been
interpreted correctly. Whelan thinks he got that confirmation. That
was last night, and we are lucky we ran into him when we did.

"
It's a little thin," Joey concluded, "but
maybe we should treat it like it's serious. Taking precautions and
such. Chic is gonna hit the streets and talk to some informants and
such. I assure you that we have obtained all the information from
Whelan that could be obtained."

"I think, tonight, Joey should stay here with
us," I said to Glenda, "mostly to make him feel better
about things, because it is not really necessary."

"Yeah, indulge an old man."

"Now what might be a good idea is, tomorrow, if
you want to, Glenda, take Wayne and go visit your mom. Or even take a
mini-vacation up in the country or at the beach. Just while we check
things out."